# Journalistic Philosophy

Journalistic philosophy is the last and most advanced philosophy. In that approach you can rapidly switch between shallow to deep work.

Essa frase é de Deep Work => Flow, um artigo de um blogue que explicava a relação entre ambos os livros e que usei como base para a posterior leitura desses livros. Este é segundo o autor o método mais avançado de focar em uma atividade.

Não é para amadores. As distrações do dia a dia aos poucos vão ficando mais tentadoras. A troca de contexto lhe dá um aval inconsciente de que é possível perder tempo com outras coisas sem ter terminado sua sessão de deep.

Por outro lado, depois de um final de semana totalmente focado em ser vagabundo a inércia irá te acompanhar nos próximos dias, e os dias que deveriam ser mais produtivos por conta do descanso extra acabam virando mais dias preguiçosos.

O importante é lembrar que é possível relaxar e ser produtivo ao mesmo tempo. Lembre-se que no flow qualquer atividade pode ser produtiva se imbuída de significado intrínseco, e é isso o que torna a filosofia jornalística eficaz.

As distrações, se concentradas em menos períodos em vez de pulverizadas ao longo do dia, podem dar uma sensação mais palpável de dever cumprido e consequentemente de descanso merecido até a próxima tarefa.

Por outro lado, se o dever se encontrar na segunda metade do dia é imperativo adotar a filosofia jornalística.

# Constituição fundamental (J. S. Mill)

Nenhum grande aperfeiçoamento da humanidade como um todo é possível até que uma grande mudança tenha lugar na constituição fundamental de seu modo de pensar.

J. S. Mill

# Cabala: A Energia da Transformação (Roshveder, Eliel)

Meditar na natureza é tocar o divino.

O Criador então criou a humanidade no cosmos, não só aqui, mas em vários mundos, para os humanos ajudarem os anjos a combater o caos e a criar a Ordem rumo ao vaso restaurado, a montagem do quebra cabeça.

A meditação Devekut une o homem ao Eterno levando ele a fazer parte desta luta contra o caos para o refinamento do UNIVERSO, este processo é chamado de Tikun Olam, quando meditamos ficamos no centro deste processo contribuindo para a redenção de toda a humanidade.

A Cabala é um conhecimento profundo que mostra a ligação entre o homem e as dimensões paralelas, sejam elas da luz ou do caos.

# A Hora da Estrela (Lispector, Clarice)

Quem vive sabe, mesmo sem saber que sabe. Assim é que os senhores sabem mais do que imaginam e estão fingindo de sonsos.

Sim, mas não esquecer que para escrever não importa o quê o meu material básico é a palavra.

(...) não é preciso acreditar em alguém ou em alguma coisa – basta acreditar. Isso lhe dava às vezes estado de graça. Nunca perdera a fé.

Por que ela não reage?

A mulherice só lhe nasceria tarde porque até no capim vagabundo há desejo de sol.

O céu é para baixo ou para cima? Pensava a nordestina. Deitada, não sabia.

Porque, por pior que fosse sua situação, não queria ser privada de si, ela queria ser ela mesma.

Tinha um quarto só para ela. Mal acreditava que usufruía o espaço. E nem uma palavra era ouvida. Então dançou num ato de absoluta coragem, pois a tia não a entenderia.

E cantada por um homem chamado Caruso que se diz que já morreu. A voz era tão macia que até doía ouvir. A música chamava-se “Una Furtiva Lacrima”.

Você não vai entender mas eu vou lhe dizer uma coisa: ainda se encontra mulher barata. Você me custou pouco, um cafezinho. Não vou gastar mais nada com você, está bem? Ela pensou: eu não mereço que ele me pague nada porque me mijei.

Ter matado e roubar faziam com que ele não fosse um simples acontecido qualquer, davam-lhe uma categoria, faziam dele um homem com honra já lavada.

Glória possuía no sangue um bom vinho português e também era amaneirada no bamboleio do caminhar por causa do sangue africano escondido. Apesar de branca, tinha em si a força da mulatice.

# Holistic Tarot (Benebell Wen)

It is a science of the mind.

It represents the spectrum of human archetypal conditions and personalities, which can be used by the modern day practitioner for psychological projective evaluation.

From the vantage points of the metaphysical and metaphysiological, the unconscious of one individual can connect to, and thus share information with, the unconscious of another individual, and every unconscious of every individual is interconnected to form a singular unconscious plane called the collective unconscious.

See Hassin, Ran R, “Yes It Can: On the Functional Abilities of the Human Unconscious,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8:2 (March 2013): 195–207.

The use of the term “unconscious” herein is based in small part on that modern view, and on the contention that the tarot can facilitate the high-level cognitive functions of the unconscious.

The “subconscious” refers to unintentional cognition and action, though still manifested in the physical reality.

These are memories from the present life that are not readily available at instant recall.

Cultural knowledge, evolutionary influences, norms, and values that are affecting an individual’s behavior and physical reality but that the individual may not be conscious and aware of will also be placed here under the term “subconscious.”

It is likened to the Eastern notion of the Akashic records, or the monotheistic singular God concept.

As used herein, the term “subconscious” refers to the periphery around the conscious plane in the mind and is the unintentional cognition that becomes unintentional action that is manifested in the physical reality.

The cards do not tell us what to do. Rather, they help us think about our problems from a different perspective and, like a diagnostics tool for decision-making, help chart a road map for the solution.

Most people’s typical analytical process incorporates rational and emotional intelligence. By learning and applying tarot, one can add a third dimension: that of spiritual intelligence.

When we study the imagery and symbols on the cards in a tarot spread, we activate our imagination. That imagination then activates our intuition, which is often the only instrument we have that channels a clear path for us to the truth of a matter. That truth is often found in the unconscious. Tarot analytics can extrapolate what is otherwise latent in the unconscious archives of our mind and raise our truths to the surface of our consciousness.

We reconcile our personal story with the narrative of the cards and through that process begin to see our own situation through new perspectives and from different angles.

Forks in the path that can positively change our outcome are illuminated. We begin to see our options. That is how tarot analytics can help. It is subjective, because it cannot tell you anything you don’t know already. It tells you exactly what you know, but have not yet permitted your conscious mind to confront. It is about accessing the unconscious, the same theory behind psychoanalysis and modern-day psychology.

Tarot is a mirror. It reflects back who you are. It shows you your strengths and weaknesses. It makes you confront the decisions you have made in the past, your attitude, both good and bad, and how these components have affected your life.

I will outline how the everyday student or professional might use a deck of tarot cards to set goals, to understand where they are in their lives and the direction they’d like to move in, and to use tarot analytics to help make business or personal decisions, not to foresee what will happen to their business or in their personal lives.

Art, which is what the tarot is, should be an active engagement.

By noting specifically how your conclusions differ, you can begin to tailor your own interpretive method in tarot analytics, which is exactly what this book hopes to encourage.

In classical Western astrology, a querent is the person who is propounding an inquiry on the astrologer and desiring a resolution.

Playing cards were generally banned by the church at the time, though an exception was made for tarot, due in no small part to its popularity among the wealthy.

Etteilla, Mathers, Waite, and many other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tarotists were Freemasons. Waite’s deck in particular, the Rider-Waite-Smith, is said to be rich with Freemason symbolism.

Jean-Baptiste Alliette, an occultist who went under the pseudonym Etteilla, published extensively on cartomancy, ascribing meanings to each card and showing how to lay a deck of playing cards in a spread for divination.

Other schools of thought also adopted the tarot, such as Martinism, a branch of esoteric Christianity founded by a Spanish-born French occultist named Gerard Encausse. Encausse is known as one of the greatest tarot practitioners in history, and in the 1890s he published the seminal work The Tarot of the Bohemians under the pseudonym Papus.

The Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck originally published in 1909 was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of famed occultist A. E. Waite. The deck was published by William Rider & Son of London. Images of that deck printed in this book are taken from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot written by A. E. Waite and published in 1911 and are thus in the public domain. They are not sourced from images that U.S. Games Systems, Inc. claims copyright to. To view the public-domain Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, see the website Sacred Texts, an archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics: www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm. Sacred Texts is run by John Bruno Hare. Holly Voley, a renowned twenty-first-century writer and researcher on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, also provides a wealth of resources about the public-domain deck. See Holly’s Rider-Waite Site, http://home.comcast.net/~vilex/ [inactive]. The images of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck used herein are sourced from Holly Voley’s archive of images.

Subsequently, countless tarot practitioners and occultists contributed their interpretations of the tarot with new decks. All of these tarot deck versions have in common the richness in cultural and mythical references relevant to the time and place of their conception, much like the deck’s forebears from Asia.

Today, tarot is popularly associated with pagan, Wiccan, neo-pagan, and other contemporary alternative faith practices. That may be why there are common associations between alternative religions, magic or magick, and tarot.

I liken tarot to yoga: It is a nondenominational practice that may be concomitant with the traditions found in certain faiths, but in modern applications can be used independently. Yoga helps with personal fitness, irrespective of one’s faith, and tarot helps with decision-making, irrespective of one’s faith.

Tarot semiotics touches frequently on faith and assumes faith to be an integral part of an individual’s ontology.

Swords represents human ambition, aggression, and force, which can lead to conquest, but more often to destruction. The cards warn of the latter, darker aspect.

Fortune-telling serves no benefit. Purporting to predict the future with certainty is detrimental to the Seeker. It diverts the Seeker’s focus from the present, and the Seeker’s own spirituality, and redirects it to a purported future outcome, to the superficial and the material.

Don’t use the tarot only because you want to know what will happen next or you might lose sight of what is happening now.

the Seeker is soliciting help in navigating the chaos of modernity.

Around 1930, psychologist Carl Gustav Jung proposed a second explanation of events. When two or more events seem to be related but cannot be adequately explained by cause and effect, the theory for how and why the events occur together is synchronicity. The theory endeavors to explain coincidences, related or similar events that occur simultaneously, that have no cause and effect relationship, but were highly unlikely to have occurred just by chance.

Apophenia, another related principle—one perhaps more critical of such practices as the tarot—suggests that it is all in the mind. Basically, events are objective and even when two or more events occur simultaneously, the occurrence is random and meaningless. It is the gullible, subjective human mind that must draw a relation and a meaning between the events.

Michael Shermer, “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise,” The Scientific American, December 2008.

Psychologist Bertram R. Forer contended that no matter how vague or overbroad a personality description is, individuals who are told that such a description pertains to them will, for one essential reason or another, believe it and adjudicate it as highly accurate.

Bertram R. Forer, “The Fallacy of Personal Validation: A Classroom Demonstration of Gullibility,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1949, 118–143.

while an individual has infinite probable futures prior to sitting down for a tarot reading, once the cards are spread, the future foretold in the cards becomes a reality.

This is the result of a magickal power in the cards, magick being a neo-pagan concept.

The divination-fulfilling prophecy assumes that the tarot, or any divination or diagnostics tool, possesses the power to nullify free will—and

There is no “power” to the divination, only power in your unconscious, in your own free will. If today the cards show outcomes that are not favorable, the cards will also reveal what needs to be done to change course to get that favorable outcome.

I believe that the cards are a flashlight that you can use to illuminate the dark terrain we walk through in life. If there are jagged rocks up ahead, the flashlight will shine on that, and we can diverge in time to take a different route. Shining the flashlight and seeing the jagged rocks does not mean we must walk straight onto them.

the tarot is also a flashlight that helps to illuminate our subconscious,

When a Seeker shuffles the cards, he or she is infusing personal energies into them, an unconscious instinctive-intuitive power in each of us that draws out the cards that will best allow our conscious power to make use of the information that is latent within.

A tarot practitioner who is attuned to his or her tarot deck will integrate his or her energies into the cards so that the deck can draw out the appropriate spread that the practitioner can best interpret for the Seeker.

Since the gift of tapping into the collective unconscious is a rarity, the majority of practitioners cannot rely on remote tarot readings. It is therefore best to conduct tarot readings in person, with physical interactions among the trinity of practitioner, tarot deck, and Seeker.

The belief in vital energies stems from the Eastern concept of qi (), a life force that flows through all living beings and cosmically connects us with one another.

The concept is similar to chakras, the energy principle of Hindu and Buddhist tantric doctrine.

Kundalini, a yogic belief that a latent spiritual energy rests within us and can be awakened through certain practices, is a form of personal energy that can reconcile our consciousness with our subconscious and the collective unconscious.

The tarot is also a tool that calculates a most probable future based on the decisions we are making in the present and our current attitudes and outlook. These are inputted into the tarot through personal qi.

The subconscious knows already the effects of the causes we’ve created; the collective unconscious knows why we are going through what we are going through.

If either the practitioner or the Seeker has not activated that qi during a tarot reading, then the cards are nothing more than just cards and the readings the result of apophenia and the Forer Effect.

Lon and Morris Isaac Stein Geiser, Evocative Images: The Thematic Apperception Test and the Art of Projection (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1999).

When we speak logically or emotionally about our lives, we are expressing in the language of the conscious, but when we use signs and symbols we begin to attune to the expression of our unconscious.

It is believed that the unconscious is revealed to the conscious through signs and symbols.

Through these signs and symbols, we are able to renounce our preconceived notions that govern the conscious plane of thought and touch upon something closer to our truth.

Tarot analytics works in the same vein as psychoanalysis.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn has long been the leading school of tarot studies.

Doctrines of the Golden Dawn are steeped in ritualistic magic and the occult or metaphysical arts, such as theurgy, alchemy, and astrology.

There is no better text on the chronology of tarot than Stuart R. Kaplan’s The Encyclopedia of Tarot, volumes one through four.

Connecting to a tarot deck is about adjusting your frame of mind and preparing yourself for intuitive work.

Connecting to your tarot deck isn’t about superstition. It’s about opening up your mind to be as receptive as possible to what the tarot has to offer.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, the imagery on the Major Arcana is based predominantly on its predecessor, the Tarot de Marseille.2

After the Major Arcana, the fifty-six Minor Arcana cards represent facets of the human condition. Whereas the Major Arcana cards represent the inner realm, the Minor Arcana cards represent the outer.

The earliest tarot decks referred to the suit as Coins. It was not until the 1900s that members of the Golden Dawn such as MacGregor Mathers renamed the suit of Coins “Pentacles.”

Think of the red as indicating active energies and the black as passive.

Active energy corresponds with the Eastern philosophical concept of yang, which is the dominant, masculine, light, hard, and dry elements of the universe. Passive energy corresponds with the concept of yin, which is the recessive, feminine, shadow, soft, and wet elements of the universe.

The concept of four classical elements—Fire, Water, Air, and Earth—originated in 440 BC with the Greek philosopher Empedocles. Fathi Habashi, “Zoroaster and the Theory of Four Elements,” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, No. 2, Volume 25, 2000, 109.

As set forth in the correspondence table on the previous page, the suits of Wands and Swords are yang while the suits of Cups and Pentacles are yin. That organization is based on a reconciliation of both Western and Eastern astrology and alchemy, which will be explained in further detail in this book.

Note: There are two somewhat contradicting approaches to elemental interpretation for Key 20: Judgement. The first follows Paul Foster Case14 and attributes it to Pluto and Vulcan, Vulcan being the Roman god of fire. Therefore Case’s approach was to attribute Key 20 to the element of Fire. The second approach follows the astrological association of Pluto with Scorpio, a water sign. Therefore, a second school of thought attributes Key 20 to the element of Water. The practitioner should consider both approaches and adopt the one that best reflects the practitioner’s own paradigm.

Note Also: There is a divide among practitioners on the elemental attribution for Key 1: The Magician. Due to the card’s planetary association with Mercury ascribed by the Golden Dawn, practitioners look to the two zodiac signs in astrology governed by Mercury: Gemini and Virgo. Gemini being Air and its clear resonance with the mental plane is why the majority of practitioners associate Key 1 with Air. However, a minority of practitioners, including the author, associates the card with Earth because Key 1 is interpreted as physical manifestations, which requires Earth. Archetypally, Key 1 is also associated with Hermes of Greek mythology, who is not only the messenger of the gods (hence the Air attribute), but also the god of commercial gain and promoter of commerce (Earth).

At the end of the day, return to the reading to reflect. Did some of the cards make sense by the end of the day? Did you misread any cards? The primary exercise of the reflection at the end of the day is to assess how well you interpreted the cards in the morning.

To practice reading spreads, start with fiction. Do not start on actual people. Sit your teddy bear across the table from you and conduct the reading aloud as if Teddy is the Seeker. Draw cards into a spread with the understanding that you are doing so for practice. Pretend that the spread is for a character. Narrate aloud to that character, Mr. Teddy, the story told by the cards. Practice linking the card meanings together and learning to see patterns. Repeat the exercise until you are accustomed to using the spread and reading the card meanings.

Before you move on to live people, you should have prepared how you will address the ominous-looking cards, how to assess the overall landscape of a spread, how to lay down a spread without hesitation or second-guessing each card’s meaning, and how to convey truths in phrases that empower, not harm. Only then will the ethical novice move on to live Seekers.

TAROT CARDS REFLECT WHO we are, and we are anything but one-dimensional.

Major Arcana reveal what is innate, perhaps even immutable, or at the very least difficult to change. The Minor Arcana1 represent that which we are in control over. If the Major Arcana cards convey our nature, then the Minor Arcana convey our nurture.

Through intensive study, you will come to understand the relevance of these symbols, so when you perform a reading and certain symbols on the card stand out more prominently to you during that reading, your intuition can readily guide you to understand the symbol’s application to the Seeker’s issue at hand.

Per Eastern metaphysical or theosophical belief, the Akashic Records is a figurative library that exists in a different dimension or astral plane from physical reality. That figurative library contains the whole of all knowledge, past, present, and future, capturing the complete spectrum of the space-time continuum. One mystical theory to the Major Arcana is that the twenty-two cards can be read in their totality to reveal the key to accessing the Akashic Records.

Some tarot historians assert a link between Cathar and gnostic doctrine with the imagery on the Major Arcana cards, believing that the imagery of the cards were used to preserve Cathar theosophy in a secret way, given the circumstances of political suppression and threat of Inquisition at the time.

The author of this book strongly recommends that the serious tarot practitioner acquire the following books for his or her reference library: John Michael Greer, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult (Llewellyn Publications, 2013) and Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages (Tarcher Books, 2013). These references will aid immensely in tarot symbolism interpretation. Many of the meanings provided in the Cyclopedia herein are influenced by both Greer’s and Hall’s works.

“As above, so below” is a foundational principle in the Hermetic tradition. It is believed to be derived from the first lines of the Emerald Tablet: “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one.” The Emerald Tablet is credited to an author who went by the name Hermes Trismegistus, which was likely a pseudonym, though no one is sure of the author’s identity. The Tablet is dated to originate from around the eleventh or twelfth century.

A snake is coiled as a belt around the magician’s waist, an ouroboros, or “tail swallower.”

In traditional alchemy, the ouroboros is associated with mercury.

Curiously, Chinese alchemy associates mercury with the dragon, a close cousin to the snake, and correlates it with intelligence and intellectualism.

The clothes worn by the magi or magician depicted on the card are of particular note. It is believed that both the Knights Templar and the Assassins wore white robes with red sashes.

The Knights Templar was a Christian military order founded after the First Crusade. The Assassins, a misnomer for the Nizari Ismailis or Order of the Nizari Seveners, a fringe Islamic order of fighters who gained a reputation for political assassinations.

While there may not be historic documentation of relevance between the tarot card and the Crusades, at the archetypal and symbolic level the synchronicity most certainly bears relevance to the practitioner.

Traditionally in the early Italian tarot decks, circa 1400s, The Fool was raggedly dressed as a beggar. Other European decks depicted The Fool as a madman. In the 1600s, the French tarot depicted The Fool as a jester, wearing a multicolored fancy shirt. Etteilla’s interpretation of The Fool was that of the alchemist. Christine Payne-Towler, The Underground Stream: Esoteric Tarot Revealed (Oregon: Noreah Press, 1999), 20.

Practitioners are divided about the elemental association of Key 1: The Magician. Generally the card is associated with Mercury. Mercury is associated with the zodiac signs Gemini, which is Air, and Virgo, which is Earth. Thus, the majority of practitioners associate The Magician with Air, believing that the card’s interpretive emphasis on the power of the mind is why it should be attributed to Air. Others, in the minority, such as the author, associate it with Earth because The Magician is also associated with the Greek myth of Hermes, who was not only a messenger of the gods, but also a promoter of commerce and the god of commercial gain. Since The Magician card is about manifestation, and Earth energy is required for any physical manifestation, the card is better associated with Earth than Air.

(...) attributions associated with Earth will represent the external forces at play in the Seeker’s situation.

The attributions for Mercury the planet should not be confused with the attributions for mercury, the metallic element. Modern astrology most often corresponds Mercury the planet with the element Earth, while Western alchemy corresponds mercury the metallic element with Air.

the planet Mercury,17 which, per Western astrological attributions, is governed by the element Earth, is what grounds the card in yin.

Moreover, per Eastern astrological attributions, Mercury is associated with the element Water, which is yin.

The Magician upright suggests someone with incredible power and force, advancing forward in a single direction in constant motion. In reverse, The Magician suggests an external force that has been applied to stop that advancing movement.

(...) in The Magician, it is his environment that is surrounded by the roses, while in Strength the roses adorn the woman’s person.

The right-hand path is about acting for the greater good, for harnessing the powers of creation—building, expanding, and bringing forth the light.

The left-hand path is the individual quest, the quest of self-fulfillment and personal honor.

Destruction means rebirth and transformation, progress, revolution, change, uprisings.

The Magician card in reverse is about breaking taboo, personal anarchism, and a focus on self-power.

In 1 Kings 7:18 and 7:20 of the Holy Bible, the twin pillars of King Solomon’s temple were decorated with pomegranates. In the High Priestess card, there are seven pomegranates depicted on the curtain, with the number 7 symbolizing wisdom and divine knowledge, the energetic vibration of sages.

In many cards of the Major Arcana, a pool of water is depicted—e.g., Key 14: Temperance, Key 17: The Star, Key 18: The Moon, and Key 20: Judgement—which represents the submergence of or emergence from varying levels of consciousness.

Contrast: Key 1: The Magician is creation in the outer sphere. Key 2: The High Priestess is creation in the inner sphere, intuition, psyche.

The Seeker is cautioned to keep sensitive information secret for now. Do not tell others yet. Secrecy abounds.

Note that both Key 2: The High Priestess and Key 3: The Empress feature pomegranates, which was believed to be first cultivated by the Phoenicians and has come to represent fertility, love, and marriage. Pomegranates were also considered a sacred fruit to the ancient Israelites and represented wisdom.

Compare: Key 3: The Empress indicates down-to-earth beauty.

The Hierophant denotes ecclesiastical authority. The High Priestess suggests an authority of natural, universal, or cosmic law.

Compare: The High Priestess suggests secrets that a person is withholding; Key 18: The Moon represents secrets of the natural world.

The High Priestess represents personal mystery; The Moon represents physical or even physiological mystery.

Note that the High Priestess card is considered by many to be one of the more difficult cards to interpret. The card itself is shrouded in mystery and therefore its meaning will vary widely from practitioner to practitioner.

# A Origem das Espécies (Darwin, Charles)

“Quanto ao mundo material, podemos pelo menos ir até à conclusão de que os fatos não se produzem em consequência da intervenção isolada do poder divino, manifestando-se em cada caso particular, mas antes pela ação das leis gerais.”

# The world you desired

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible…. ( Atlas Shrugged, 1957 [1992]: 983).

from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy